Update: Jan. 7, 2004

Last month, a judge from the US Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia
made an important
ruling on the legality of the subpoenas issued by the RIAA through the DMCA.
The decision says that the RIAA does not have the right to subpoena ISP's for
personally identifying information.

Explanation through example:

Previously, the RIAA would find IP addresses of people they believed to be
violating copyright laws. Although IP addresses uniquely identify each computer
on the Internet, there is no public directory linking IP addresses to people's
names. The main way of finding out which person is associated with an IP address
is to ask the ISP (Internet Service Provider) responsible for that IP address.
That is, to ask the company who is responsible for connecting that IP address
to the rest of the Internet. For privacy reasons, companies won't give this
information out. So when the RIAA got an IP address, they would subpoena the
ISP to release that information so that they could identify who the person is.
The subpoena forces the ISP to release this information by law. Specifically,
it is the DMCA (see below) that allowed the RIAA to do this.

The problem is that, as the judge ruled, the DMCA's subpoena cannot be used
in this way. It only allows the RIAA to get information from an ISP if they
already have a name. (More information on one
ISP's new policy (Cox)).

This is my understanding of the ruling, but I'm not a lawyer. I recommend you
read
it for yourself (requires Adobe Acrobat Reader).

(my original article follows):

I'm going to be honest and straightforward. I don't yet know a whole
lot about the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. I'm trying to learn more, but
as I understand it now, I am outraged about several major points, the first
of which is the motivation for this article.

As you may or may not be aware, record companies recently filed suit against
several hundred people for illegally sharing copyrighted material. What you
are less likely aware of is that these peoples' names, addresses, and phone
numbers were obtained by the RIAA (the Recording Industry Association of America
- what most people just call "the record companies") using subpoena's
authorized by the DMCA.

Does this not outrage you?! It does me. And I can't believe this law was actually
passed. If you feel like me, and have some ideas or just want to discuss it,
email me. I have some ideas, but
I'm still thinking about it...